In the field of road transport, accurate vehicle maintenance is the best strategy to minimize the possibility of encountering sudden and unexpected failures, which can cause great losses of time and often considerable costs, which arise both from the possible costs for repairing the failures that have occurred and from the temporary inactivity of the vehicles themselves, especially if they are used in work (for example for the transport of goods). Equally, the possible risks of road accidents caused by failures that vehicles can experience during travel also must be considered.
To prevent the technical inconveniences that all types of road vehicle can encounter, and therefore to avoid the economic inconveniences and the road safety problems related to them, it is indispensable to perform scrupulous periodic maintenance of the mechanical components of the vehicle in use, which necessarily operate must operate in conditions of perfect efficiency, particularly elements such as tires, the maintenance of which is often neglected. Such maintenance provides mainly for two steps: the measurement and optional adjustment of the pressure of the tire, the optimum value of which is defined on the basis of the mass of the vehicle and on the tire being used, and the assessment of the thickness and general conditions of the tread.
Unfortunately, most vehicles are not subjected to this type of periodic tire check, often due to the negligence of the person in charge of the vehicle or more simply due to that person's lack of time and/or money. If someone who habitually uses the vehicle does not detect particular grip problems while driving, he will not see the need for any maintenance intervention. On the contrary, if the person who uses the vehicle habitually detects difficulties in driving due to the tires, quite probably it will be too late to perform a normal maintenance intervention, since an excessive or in any case irregular wear of the tread might occur which is caused by insufficient tire pressure, a condition for which replacement thereof would be necessary.
Recently, with the development of telemetry, systems have been developed for the automatic measurement and/or analysis of vehicle parameters and in particular also of parameters related to tires, such as pressure. However, these systems are not used regularly by vehicle operators, since they require high power consumption, due the continuous power supply of the electronic components involved, which must be ensured in order to be able to monitor such parameters. The power consumption, however, does not lead to a large number of measurement/analysis operations performed by the systems, since said systems, in normal conditions, spend most of the time in an active condition but in standby, until a vehicle to be subjected to the preset checks approaches.
Moreover, known systems are mostly isolated and process data exclusively locally, depriving the user of the possibility to gather, in any manner, a broader set of information, for example related to all the vehicles (such as light and heavy road tractors, trucks, trailers, semitrailers, vans) that belong to a company that is active in the field of goods transportation.